A Signature Feature, Built to Belong

Helm Custom Homes, led by David Helm, builds high-end custom residences. For the Galloway House project, an 11,000-square-foot residence valued at $1.5 million, his team set out to bring a modern desert-inspired aesthetic to the Midwest. They designed an indoor-outdoor resort-style home drawn from the Southwest architecture of St. George, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.

At the heart of the primary suite in the Galloway House, alongside the steam shower, sits a custom Sunlighten infrared sauna. Designed as an intimate spa retreat for the homeowners, the roughly 70-square-foot sauna seats two comfortably. It’s a luxurious focal point that carries the home's design language inside its walls.

Helm and his team felt that a standard sauna unit dropped into a finished room would not do. They wanted the sauna to mesh with the home's aesthetic, stand as something beautiful to look at, and still deliver a genuine infrared wellness experience within a compact footprint.

That ambition raised the bar on execution. The build called for custom woodworking, electrical, integrated lighting, and specialty materials rarely seen in a sauna, including a Himalayan salt block wall, and landscape rock.

The design process began in early 2025 and wrapped in August 2026. It started with 3D modeling, and for Helm that matters. He wants his clients to see a space before it’s built, not try to picture it in their heads. Sunlighten delivered renderings and drawings that showed exactly how the finished sauna would look and feel from the outset.

From there, the teams worked in tandem. As Helm describes it, his crew “built the box, and Sunlighten came in and filled it.” Every detail through the construction process was communicated clearly, so the build stayed on track.

Installation was where the partnership proved itself again. Sunlighten's install team handled the woodworking, electrical, specialty salt-block and lighting finishes, floor features, and the landscape rock.